M is for . . . .

 
mia
Alan Bern

Every step unmentioned. The creek moved to the falls. The baby rattler slipped off from the water onto sand and into brush. Mia lay back over smooth rock naked in the sun with her arms open to the breeze. Waterfalling sounds increased as the sun began to go down. I climbed up. Then we lay together side-by-side, nothing between us. Our sounds were half-words, then questions. Our tongues touched. Answers. Dinner was small and uncooked. We slept under 1000 stars. Under light blankets.


mustard
Antonia Matthew

My aunt lived in a residential hotel. Some days when I visited, I played with the hotel manager’s daughter. In the morning, we helped set the tables for lunch. Each round table had a stiff white table cloth, napkins, a small vase, and a silver cruet set. We fetched the cruet sets, brought them to the workroom and set them on the table to be filled. The mustard pots were round and silver with three bent feet, a fancy handle and a tiny spike on the top of the lid, to lift it up. Inside was a small, deep blue glass bowl that reflected the light, and a tiny silver spoon shaped like a ladle. When the lid was shut, the thin handle fitted into an opening in the lid. Our job was to fill the blue bowls with mustard that was already mixed. We used tiny coffee spoons to spoon out the mustard and a cloth to wipe off any spills. Then we carefully put the bowls back inside the pots, slipped in the spoons and closed the lids. When all the cruets were filled, we put them inside their silver holders and carried them back to the tables.


marigolds
Barbara Brazill

Marigolds on the small table soft as silk.


marilyn
Barrie Levine

My cousin and I were fervent movie fans in the 1950s. We made up scrapbooks and traded photos of glamorous Hollywood stars. But Marilyn Monroe was our idol, and we followed her life story and career faithfully. I decided to write to Marilyn herself at Twentieth Century Fox to request an autographed picture. By return mail I received an 8×10 black and white glossy of Marilyn leaning against a draped satin background and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace, with an inscription in bright red ink addressed to me. My mom gave me permission to place a long-distance telephone call to my cousin to share the exciting news. Forty years later, a woman brought in the same photo of MM to Antiques Roadshow. The appraiser flipped out and said that Marilyn herself had used red ink, estimating the value at $5,000. It was later determined through archival research that studio secretaries customarily signed for Marilyn, regardless of the ink color. The potential to sell it to help pay my daughter’s tuition was no longer an issue. Instead, I got to keep the treasured photo of the sweet, sad, and beautiful movie star who I adored as a teen, and still do.


muddles
Blue Waters

When I was a kid I took great pride in the fine art of making mud pies. I called my favorite creations “muddles.” It was a simple and yet complicated procedure. I started by turning on the outside faucet and letting water collect in a dusty patch of the front lawn. Then I’d climb a nearby tree for a while to watch the water soak in deeply. Soon it was time to jump into the muddy pool and get to work. With my trusty shovel I dug up many clumps of mud and stacked them in my little red wagon. Then I’d find a special place to build a giant muddle. I’d grab up handfuls of gooey mud and mold them into sassy little shapes, giving each one some love and individual character. When I had a whole lot of mud pies I started piling them on top of each other to make a waist-high formation. A muddle was born and began its life. That could be a long time or last only until the neighbor’s St. Bernard toppled it. I didn’t care. The making of another muddle was just a day or two away. That was the fun part, after all.


music
Carole Johnston

Music can cause a soul to quake. Recently, I heard Abigail Washburn sing an old time Appalachian Mountain song, “Bright Morning Stars.” This song is usually sung as a round in traditional shape note style. Hearing this type of singing helps a person appreciate Appalachian culture. I had heard Abigail’s “warbly” voice before, but this song struck a chord in my heart. I don’t use words like soul and heart often, but what else can I say? I was stunned. I could not move. My skin began to vibrate, from legs and arms, to scalp. I quivered and quaked. This song came from England to Kentucky, with the Shakers, and it has enthralled audiences here for centuries. I was not born or raised in Kentucky but I am overwhelmed by the rich cultural heritage even though I do not share it. I do not quite fit in here. But the mountains call out to me. Traditional, Appalachian music strums in my bones. It echoes from a past life. “Day is a-breaking in my soul.”


marked
Christina Martin

“It's in the kitchen, it's in the kitchen!”  My little girl's screams are part wonder, part horror. I rush into the kitchen fully expecting to see a wild animal at the very least, ferociously lolling its tongue and baring its fangs, but no. The carrier pigeon (I notice a tag on its pink leathery leg) is sitting on the counter and then goes to hide behind the corn flakes box. Very ungainly it looks, with its prehistoric head and black bead eyes, but kind of pathetic. My daughter pushes her head forward excitedly, wanting to see. It's all a game of what to do to help the pigeon. When it finally leaves, I feel the slightest touch of feather-breath on my cheek. I smile, gently marked for peace.


monster
Deborah Burke Henderson

my monster has always been lying in wait, just below the surface, ready to pounce … but i’ve learned to lift my head, straighten my spine, and, once again, tell it to “back off.” why this intensity, this undercurrent, this trace of fear that pervades my being? of what am i afraid? failure, i suspect. not being good or worthy enough. i fall into the trap of comparing myself with others and often fall short. i subscribe to a higher power, yet still there are these doubts, these stirrings. when i surrender, though, and move within the ebb and flow of the universe, something beautiful happens. when i engage in creativity, strength and guidance find me, and contentment fills me. letting go and being mindful are key. looking at the naked truth head on, i push through it, again and again. my monster keeps me on tippy toe; i guess i wouldn’t have it any other way.


m
Emily Johnson

m sounds murmur and mumble and bumble and hum. They’re music and moonlight and mountains and mist. They’re Jiminy Cricket and pink bubblegum. They’re Mesopotamia, mummies in pits. Hummingbirds, memories, hominy grits.   

memory
Ian M. Shapiro

I just arrived home, it's later than I thought. I'm writing to you because I'm trying to understand it all. Seeing you across the street, and saying oh my god, is that you? And seeing you say, is that you? And seeing your eyes. And trying to understand time and distance and love and all. And asking if you have time for tea. And walking together, and talking together, and all we remember, and then, even more, all we simply don't. How is that possible? And you ask if I still tell stories. And you ask whether stories are just a means, a means to create a common memory, simply because we don't remember the same things? Is that all that stories are? If that's all stories are, then I'm done with stories, I just want my memory back. I want our memories back. But I don't accept it. I want our memories and our stories too. I'm just trying to understand, just trying to recall. It was so good to see you. It was so good to walk. It was so good to talk. It was so good to sit and have tea. With love.

message
Jack Goldman

Last year, before the Fall, I was awakened at sunrise by the tapping of a woodpecker pecking at a telephone pole outside my window. I grumbled a bit, but dismissed the incident until the stubborn bird returned, tapping on the pole like a telegraph operator sending an urgent message. This year the street is silent and I am kept awake by the woodpecker’s absence.

 
mortified
Jim Mazza
 
Stepping into the small shop, I am overcome by the smell. Cheeses, meats, garlic, olives engulf my senses. So saturated is the air that I consider turning my back or covering my nose. But this reaction quickly gives way to the pleasure of it, eliciting memories of holiday dinners with my sizable Italian-American family . . . of home. What is it about briny sardines, peppery salami, and roasted chestnuts that evoke such feelings of comfort? This is my first trip to Italy, and I’m eager to absorb every aroma, every flavor. Behind the counter stands a stout woman clad in a tightly wrapped apron. I croak a meek, “Buongiorno.” She smiles with encouragement, but I immediately regret my poor language skills. I stammer: “Mozzarella?”  She responds: “Si, signore, mortadella,” reaching for a cylinder of fat-flecked sausage. “No, no, signora. Mozzarella,” I say, a little louder. Her: “Mortadella?”  Me: “No, mozzarella.” Clearly, something is wrong. “Maaah-za-RAAAY-LA,” I say again, pointing towards the soft globes floating in milky water. “Ah, capisco,” she roars, “MOH-zah-rell-ah!” Using her bare hand she cradles the large, dripping cheese, holding it aloft for me to inspect. Mortified by my ugly mispronunciations, I can only nod. Relieved, she asks, “EEEt’s okay?”


mouse
Joan Leotta

At five-thirty, one morning, when I opened the door to my pantry to pull out the cereal for the children’s breakfast, a small gray mouse blinked out at me. I screamed. She ran. I shivered when I read about the diseases mice carry. I called an exterminator for more information. It seems roadwork destroyed nearby woods, and a cold spell combined to make Mama Mouse leave the woods for our home while we were vacationing a few weeks earlier. “They likely entered through the garage,” the exterminator told me, “from there into your basement, then up to your pantry.” I have to admit, I felt a certain sympathy with the mouse mother who had looked for food and safe housing for her family. But my children’s health came first. I bought traps. I bought containers for food. Steel wool for garage panels.As I scoured the pantry, boxed all food items into tin and plastic, I thought about my strategy. Mama mouse was hard to trap, but a have-a-heart trap found her. In the basement, I discovered a nest and hoped it was the only one. Carefully, I bagged both for removal. Sorry, Mouse. House is ours, woods are yours.


modesty
Judith Sornberger

When instructing her daughters to be modest, our mother meant “dressing or behaving so as to avoid impropriety or indecency” (OED). We girls wore dresses or skirts to school, so the first lesson in being ladylike was to keep your knees together while sitting so no one could see up your skirt. In our teens, Mom tried to convince us that it was more enticing to leave something to the imagination than to reveal too much of our bodies. This advice usually popped up when we shopped for bathing suits. A two-piece that looked innocent on the hanger often became too revealing, in her eyes, once on my developing figure. I’d pose before the fitting room mirror, delighted by the way it showed a bit of cleavage and my navel, knowing Mom would nix it when I stepped out. Leaving something to the imagination was a hard sell to a fifteen-year-old. But it showed she wasn’t only trying to keep me modest, that she thought being sexy, in a limited way, was a good thing, acknowledging me as a young woman with choices about the way she presented herself to the world. And, perhaps best of all, one a boy might imagine things about.


monday
Kathleen Kramer

This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes. This is the way we wash our clothes so early Monday morning. I feel safe and happy when we sing this in Mrs. Errigo’s first grade class because I know that my mother and my grandma are doing what the song says. At our house, up on the hill, they’re trundling the big, wringer washer from the spare room onto the kitchen linoleum. They’re filling it with lots of hot water, heated on the stove. They’re putting the first load — the white clothes — into the wide mouth of the washer. And now the agitator is turning back and forth, back and forth — chugga-chug, chugga-chug. If I were home, I might try to dance to it, but doing the wash is important work and Mother and Grandma have to be careful not to get their fingers caught in the wringer rollers that squeeze the clothes through and plop them into the rinse tub on the other side. If I were home — sick with a cold, maybe — I’d be in my bed upstairs, under the quilt made by Aunt Helen, and the chugga-chug, chugga-chug of the washing machine would be like a daytime lullaby.


mmmm…
Katrina Morse
 
When most mothers in the 1960s were mixing up cakes from boxes iced with frosting from a can and heating up TV dinners in aluminum trays for their families, my mother only made food from “scratch.” There was a brief time when we ate squishy white Wonder Bread packaged in the plastic bag printed with colorful circles that always reminded me of a circus. But then she started making Anadama Bread, with its molasses and cornmeal making it a hearty toast and sandwich bread. Sugar was not something to cut back on then. We ate homemade macaroni and cheese (topped with ketchup), grape jelly omelets, Joy of Cooking recipe for hot fudge sauce on vanilla ice cream, and grandma’s recipe for chocolate cake with chocolate icing.  Granola, potato bread with a swirled cinnamon filling, snickerdoodle cookies. She did use some time-saving frozen vegetables. Sadly they were always overcooked and heavily salted. Lima beans, eww! Soggy spinach. Overcooked cauliflower, yuk! But oh the memories of freshly baked bread. I can still conjure up the heavenly smell on the warm blast of heat from the oven. Wait just a bit until it cools and then slather a slice with soft butter. Mmmm…


monster
Margaret Dennis

I am scared of monsters. When I was little, I was sure there was a monster in my bedroom closet. Even though I shared a room with my little brother, I was certain he was coming for me. At bedtime, my mother insisted that all lights be off and the door tightly shut. Every night I would pull the covers up and lie as still as I could, and as flat as I could, hoping that when the monster came out he wouldn’t know I was there. When that didn’t stop making me feel scared, I would quietly get up, open the bedroom door and tiptoe to the top of the stairs. I could usually hear the radio on as my mother and father listened to their favorite shows. I would eventually get up the courage to call down. “Mommie, can I open the door and have the hall light on?” She would come to the bottom of the stairs and say harshly “No! Get back to bed!” I would scurry back to bed, but this exchange would be repeated until she would threaten to “come up there!” I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I would return to bed. Monster or no monster, I didn’t want my mother’s wrath. Funny, these days I find I always sleep with a teeny tiny night light on.


moonflower
Marilyn Ashbaugh

It was love at first sight. I saw her in a neighbor’s garden at dusk on my summer walk. I mistook her for a morning glory, albeit one with poor timing. Before my eyes she began unfurling in her whirling-dervish way as she revealed her inner glow. I wanted her for my garden but I never saw her again.


medusa
Miriam Sagan

In our girls’ school uniforms we watch “Le Chien Andalu” in the auditorium. I’d rather be in the bathroom, hanging out and smoking Balkan Sobranies with my friend Juliet. She favors the black ones with the gold filters. They taste of elsewhere. A hole opens in the man’s palm and ants crawl in and out. I’m unimpressed. We have plenty of ants, in every sandy crack in the sidewalk. My father is at war with all nature, setting mouse and ant traps all over the house. And yelling at us if we leave the sugar bowl uncovered. But he is losing the battle. An old mop abandoned on the back porch is colonized by yellow jackets who build a nest in its snaky Medusa head. My father’s three daughters swell from flat-chested childhood into the busty rebellion of womanhood. We roll up our uniform skirts and show our legs, a shadow between the thighs. We believe, for the first time, that we are real, and begin to act accordingly.


maritime
Pris Campbell

Fourteen months of love letters from Vietnam and my fiancé’s ship is returning to Pearl Harbor for its four month break between tours. I’ve taken a job in Hawaii as a psychologist the last three months while I wait. Navy pay, even for an ensign, is poverty level so we’ll need my money to save for our future. The ship steams into the harbor channel finally, our crepe paper lei carried to meet it by a tug boat. Lei draped over the bow in the scented air, we wait, as sailors, all in dress white, stand in formation on deck. The navy band plays as the ship docks. My heart flutters. My stomach does the rumba. Two months later, my love and I rush out from the chapel under a vee of swords. Our reception is also the first big welcome home party, held at a friend’s navy apartment, food cooked by my matron of honor and me. I don’t yet know the toll being in Vietnam has taken but I will find out. I will lose the dream. But that’s all in my future. This night I dance.


married
Summer Killian

this is about a time when you rest your pretty head on someone else's sweatshirted chest and for a second, you don't know how old you are or what year it is — you don't need to know. you just know you love being right there, but — to be truthful, you forgot how it could feel — because it has been so long since it was just the two of you in a parking lot at dusk next to a field of dying sunflowers somebody planted by a deep, deep lake. cars are leaving, scattering pebbles as they pull out onto the highway, muffling the sounds of the crickets and the peepers only for a moment, and then you can hear it all again. there's a rhythm there, and some kind of message, too. so you stand there together, listening. are you smiling against each other's bowed heads now? maybe from a distance you look like those flowers, and you think to yourselves: we are married, we are married and it could be that you don't even know what that means, but now you are reminded of what it feels like.


maples
Theresa A. Cancro
 
I am six when I plant them, dozens of silver maple seeds in our garden out by the swing set. One by one, I create row upon row of plantings. I methodically insert my finger into the dirt. With gentle, circular motions, I widen the space and drop in a maple whirl-i-gig. I cover each seed with moist, pungent loam, a rich mixture of local soil and peat moss. Some of them grow, at first fragile and weak, but later they begin to sprout woody limbs. I water them daily after I get home from school. When we move to our new house, I make sure that Dad brings the saplings along. Mom and I have transferred them to small pots. We place them in boxes stacked against the back wall of the new porch. I ask Dad when we can plant them in the yard. He sets the pots out on the lawn, spacing them carefully, while I imagine shady spots. Miniature maples reach their branches to the sky. We plant one or two that day, the rest during long summer weekends.


mapquest
Tina Wright       
 
I like maps — for roads and highways, sure, but more maps of forests and parks. The Jenksville State Forest pamphlet map will never be in print again; some of my maps are scotch-taped. I once gave directions to hikers whose phones (with state forest trail maps) did not work in parts of Bear Swamp. Ah, but the Finger Lakes National Forest has brochure maps, lots, at many kiosks, so go Forest Rangers! I like maps. When people first used MapQuest to go places by car, it was pretty beta. Rural Moravia, where I grew up, has a tractor path called Church Road, a real road in the distant past, now a dirt track for tractors and jeeps, farmers’ pickups. MapQuest sent folks up and down that road, people heading to Moravia or Auburn. By tractor a zillion years ago, I had hauled hay down Church Road so it was funny to think of cars on that rocky steep tractor path (in winter? hahaha) but it is a good thing MapQuest finally rerouted the way. I’m not that mean.  


math
Tom Clausen

It started out so promising . . . I actually liked math at the outset. First there was addition. Simple adding numbers to other numbers. I was especially pleased with single digit numbers but became really impressed when I was able to do double and triple digits and carry over a number into the next column. Then came subtraction, again, a certain pride and confidence with the conquest of what was involved and I mostly could handle the taking away one number from another. I'll admit when division entered the picture there was concern, anxiety, and worry, but little by little with lots of error I began to sort of handle it. The same with multiplication. What came next, though, was way over my head which began to swim in the maze of numbers. There were bases, algebra, geometry, calculus and problem sets. It became clear I was out of my element with all the new-fangled math being presented. Taking math over in summer school didn't help but I got through it all somehow. To this day I cringe a bit at any hint of math beyond addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. I still am happiest with single digit numbers; double digits are ok and I can accept triple digits. But let's stop right there!    


money
Zee Zahava

I was probably 10 or 11 when I started to receive an allowance from my parents. In the beginning it was small: 25 cents a week. It soon went up to 50 cents. Eventually, one whole dollar. I spent my allowance immediately. On junk. Candy from the corner shop; trinkets from John’s Bargain Store. When I was in high school I earned money by babysitting. No more candy or cheap doodads for me. I saved all my babysitting money and on Saturday mornings I’d take the D train down to Greenwich Village. So many places to buy the things I wanted most: books and records; wide embroidered ribbons to sew onto the hems of my jeans to make them longer, more bell-bottom-y; cotton head scarves that Mom called shmattas (rags). One day the hippie who worked in my favorite record store gave me a kazoo as a present. He said I looked like the kind of person who should go around playing a kazoo. So that’s what I did. Wherever I went. Me and my kazoo. It became my most precious possession. And it didn’t cost me a penny.